news details |
|
|
| Can science bring China and India closer? | | |
Pallavi Aiyar
For meaningful cooperation aimed at the realisation of both countries' scientific aspirations, a change in mindset will be necessary.
PHOTO: PTI
Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal and his Chinese counterpart, Xu Guanhua, after signing a Memorandum of Understanding in Beijing on September 7.
THE LATEST in an increasing number of high-level visits from India to China is that of Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal. The two countries have in the last year alone signed collaborative Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) in various sectors ranging from security to energy and defence.
Mr. Sibal and his counterpart, Xu Guanhua, added to this list on September 7 when they signed an MoU that establishes an India-China Steering Committee on Science and Technology Cooperation.
This latest MoU comes at a time when both countries, two of the world's fastest growing economies, are engaged in an attempt to emerge as scientific powerhouses.
In recent years the neighbours have separately made clear their belief that economic growth and development must be underpinned by scientific know-how and the two governments have begun to invest vast amounts in largely similar areas of scientific research including space technology, nuclear energy and biotechnology. The Presidents of both India and China are scientists. Hu Jintao is a trained hydraulic engineer while A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is one of India's most distinguished scientists.
Single-minded approach
But what makes China stand out is the single-minded manner in which the current leadership is pursuing its goals, mobilising in the process the enormous resources at its disposal.
One of the chief underlying principles of China's current five-year-plan (2006-2010) is what has been dubbed the necessity to build an "innovation society." To this end the central government has allocated 71.6 billion yuan ($8.9 billion) towards investment in science and technology in 2006, an increase of over 19 per cent from the previous year.
In Premier Wen Jiabao's speech to the Chinese National People's Congress' annual meeting in March, he stressed China needed to develop the capacity for "independent innovation" to be achieved through a combination of enhancing domestic S&T capabilities and assimilating foreign technologies.
This highlights a fundamental difference in the Chinese and Indian approaches to S&T. While India on the whole still prefers to focus on developing technologies indigenously in splendid isolation, China has embraced foreign technological know-how, a step Beijing believes is necessary to be able to "leapfrog advances in key areas."
Such collaboration with technologically advanced nations has enabled China to recently emerge as only the third country in the world to put a human being into space. China is also now on track to achieve its goals of a spacewalk by 2008, docking of flight vehicles in orbit by 2012, and a manned space station not long after that.
China has, in fact, entered into space technology cooperation with some 40 countries and is currently working on the establishment of an Asia-Pacific Space cooperation organisation to be based in Beijing.
Similarly, it has big plans for the development of nuclear technology. Over the next 15 years China hopes to bring online 30 new nuclear power plants, leading to a four-fold increase in its nuclear energy capacity, up from the current 8,700 MW to some 40,000 MW. So far, Beijing has committed $50 billion towards the new constructions.
But once again rather than reinvent the wheel, China has imported commercial nuclear power plants from Russia, France, and Canada, allowing for an absorption of a variety of technologies and the training of a generation of local engineers. China is also embarking on a fast breeder programme, once again with outside assistance. The programme is aided by Russia and the aim is to have a prototype 600 MW fast breeder reactor by 2015.
Ultimately, however, Beijing wants to use these technology transfers to build up its own capacity for independent innovation. The Government's stated goal is to be dependent for less than 30 per cent of all S&T on foreign developed technologies by 2020.
There are a range of factors propelling China's chase for scientific glory. Beijing realises that for the country's economic boom to be sustainable it cannot rely on the low-cost, mass manufacturing that is its current USP. For China's authorities it is not enough for the country to play the hands and feet for the brains of the developed world. Science and technology are seen as key to the country's ability to affect the desired transformation from low-cost manufacturing base dependent to a knowledge economy powered by indigenous innovation.
Moreover, a strong vein of techno-nationalism is evident in China. Events such as the successful launching of the Shenzhou 5 & 6 spacecraft were seen by the entire country as a source of great national pride and international prestige.
In the last two decades, a slew of engineering marvels such as the Three Gorges dam and the Qinghai-Tibet railway have formed concrete symbols to the Chinese people and the outside world of just how far the country has come from the not-so-distant days of famine and poverty.
China's approach to bridging the gap between its growing economic prowess and relatively backward scientific capabilities is to inject huge quantities of cash into research and personnel. It is Beijing's stated goal to ramp up research spending in S&T to about 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2020. Currently, the R&D expenditure amounts to roughly 1.3 per cent of GDP. India by contrast spends less than one per cent of its considerably smaller GDP on scientific research.
In an indication of just how seriously the government is taking its quest to build an "innovation society," the National Natural Science Foundation (NNSF), one of China's main scientific research funding bodies, received $425 million from the central government's budget this year alone, a 25 per cent increase over the previous year. By 2010 the NNSF's budget is expected to double to reach $850 million.
Critics of China's approach say that simply spending huge amounts of money will not solve the basic lacunae in the country's scientific set-up: an educational system and political environment that does not encourage creativity or critical thinking. But nonetheless the fact that China has already walked a long road to scientific achievements is indisputable.
Whether it can take the next step to evolve into a true world-leader in the scientific field is however a different question. It is also a question that India is simultaneously asking of itself.
The similarities in the scientific ambitions and achievements of India and China potentially set them up as competitors. But as is in the case of other fields, strategic collaboration is likely to yield greater mutual benefits than cut-throat competition.
Bilateral cooperation in S&T has ostensibly been going on since an inter-governmental agreement was signed during the visit of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to Beijing in 1988. Since then an Indo-China Joint S&T Committee has been put in place and several MoUs concluded to promote collaborative research and exchanges in areas including Meteorology, Ocean Science and Technology, Biotechnology, and so on. But the slew of agreements notwithstanding, on the ground scant progress in genuine collaboration has been made.
Mr. Sibal's current visit could simply become another footnote in this recent history of toothless agreements. Security concerns emanating from the as-yet-unsettled boundary dispute and a history of mistrust remain barriers. For meaningful cross-Himalayan cooperation aimed at the realisation of both countries' scientific aspirations, a change in mindset on both sides of the border will be necessary.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
